


Battlemage

by Avia_Isadora



Series: Jauffre Trevelyan [3]
Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Action/Adventure, Backstory, Fifth Blight (Dragon Age), Friendship, Gen, Mages (Dragon Age), The Blight (Dragon Age), War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-21
Updated: 2020-01-21
Packaged: 2021-02-27 05:11:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,791
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22351579
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Avia_Isadora/pseuds/Avia_Isadora
Summary: Thom Rainier didn't meet Inquisitor Trevelyan in the Hinterlands, not for the first time.  That was along a contested riverbank during the Blight eleven years ago.
Series: Jauffre Trevelyan [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1599952
Kudos: 3





	Battlemage

“We need some support up here!” Captain Thom Rainier shouted at his runner to be heard over the din of Darkspawn drums. He could see them moving in the unnatural fog across the river, now low in its banks and all too easily fordable. “Tell the Chevalier that I need mages. We’ve got to break that line and hold the other bank if we want to hold the line at the Chevin.”

“Yes, ser.” The runner disappeared into the fog on her errand. 

Thom adjusted his steel mask. It provided full faceplate armor protection, but it messed up his peripheral vision completely. It was the uniform, and given that Darkspawn blood carried the Taint, getting it in your mouth or eyes was a death sentence. Better to compromise sight for the protection of the mask.

His soldiers waited at the ready. Across the river the Darkspawn were moving, but it was impossible to tell if they planned an advance. Here the Chevin was broad and shallow, having left the mountains where it sprung cool and swift on its way to the Waking Sea. The valley of the Chevin was one of the most populous parts of Orlais. They were to hold the Darkspawn to the line of the Chevin on pain of death.

And many had died. His company had lost a third of its strength in the last twelve days. Replacements were promised but hadn’t arrived. The Chevalier had none to send. All up and down the higher valley the Orlesian army was heavily engaged, trying to keep the Darkspawn hordes from the tender underbelly of farms and villages and towns full of tens of thousands of people who could not run or had no place to run to. And at the river’s mouth was the city of Val Chevin itself, a prosperous port home to a hundred thousand people, one of the richest cities in Orlais. Its parks and theaters, dockyards and taverns, palaces and tenements were beyond price. If it cost the entire army, the Darkspawn could not progress down the Chevin.

Above the fogs, day was coming. The darkness lightened to an eerie gray. Across the river the drums began again. “Stay sharp!” Thom shouted.

There was the rustle of arms off to his right, a battlemage coming down the lines, two Templars following him closely. He was Thom’s own age, dark hair threaded with premature gray, with a long, mobile face. His white surcoat gleamed in the dimness. Mages wore white so that you could keep an eye on them. “You needed a mage?”

“Mages,” Thom said, emphasizing the plural.

“I’m the one there is,” the mage said. “The Chevalier doesn’t have another to send. So what do you need done?”

Beneath his mask Thom’s eyebrows rose. Cocky fellow to think he’d do the work of a whole unit, but then mages were. “I need their lines opened,” he said. “We’re retaking the other bank. I need covering fire and a break in their lines so we can get a beachhead.”

“Let’s take a look.” The mage stepped up the little hill Thom had been using as a command post, the Templars close behind, one male and one female, each with sheathed great swords. They were there not to guard him but to protect everyone else from him if he went rogue. Or to keep him from running, Thom thought. Locked in their towers except to fight, poor sods, you could hardly blame a mage if he took the chance to run when he got it.

“Over there to the right,” the mage said. “Is that some kind of building?”

“There’s a deserted farmstead,” Thom said. He hoped to the Maker it had been deserted before the Darkspawn arrived. “And the bank is steeper. I’d rather push left. The Chevin isn’t deep and the bank is fairly low and solid.”

The mage nodded thoughtfully. “So you’d like to push through about there?” He pointed.

“That would do,” Thom replied. “And there’s some indication they have an Emissary.”

The mage swung about sharply. “Didn’t that bear mentioning first?”

“We can take the Emissary,” the taller of the two Templars said. “We can dampen its casting and then it’s just mopping up.”

“Just a bit of mopping,” Thom said. As though a spell-casting Darkspawn was nothing. Mages weren’t the only ones around here who were cocky. Templars could teach them a thing or two. “How long have you been here?”

“We’ve been on the line ten days,” the mage said. “Before that, we were up on the Nevarran border with the Darkspawn attack there.”

So maybe he did know what he was talking about. “Well, let’s do it then,” Thom said. 

They formed up, the fog for once favoring them. The Darkspawn couldn’t see what they were doing across the river any better than the Orlesians could see them. Thom adjusted his mask for the best vision, his shield on his arm. He sent the runner along the line so he wouldn’t have to give the order loudly. “Advance on my order. Company to the front. Charge where you see the gap open.” 

He turned to the mage. “Your show.”

The mage lifted his head, mouth moving in not quite a smile. “Here we go then.” His iron-shod staff moved in a circle, his left hand prickling with current that glowed indigo, the hair on Thom’s arms standing up as the electricity built. It was like a rising whine almost beneath hearing. Building. A purple ball was forming, the staff running with light.

And then he threw it. There was no other word for it. The lightning blasted from his fingers, shooting across the Chevin, striking and arcing from one Darkspawn to another. A cheer rose from the Orlesian ranks.

“Forward!” Thom shouted. “For the Empress!”

The company plunged forward, the warm, muddy water around their knees. Above their heads another bolt of lighting streamed. It slammed into the Darkspawn just ahead of Thom, stunning and burning and knocking them to their knees. 

And then they were among them. Then it was cut and parry, cut and parry. A giant Hurlock turned to Thom, axe upraised, and he took the blow on his shield though it nearly dislocated his shoulder, left arm temporarily numb.

Fire raced around him, striking the Hurlock as if he’d been doused in lantern oil. He went up like a torch.

Thom pushed forward. Cut and parry. Dark blood spattered against his mask. 

There was the answering fire, the Emissary taller than the Darkspawn around it, cold light gleaming from its long fingers, suddenly dowsed. The Templars were there, one with a false daylight around her that emanated from her small form, the other Templar at her back holding off Hurlocks.

Cut and parry. They were closing in around the beachhead, but the Company was holding their own. Slice. Parry. Slam. Thom drove his shield against a genlock, then stabbed low and deep.

Something hit him on the side of the head hard enough that his vision spun, the world darkening. He staggered to one knee.

And then the world exploded in white fire. For a long moment he could see nothing.

“All right there?”

Thom shook his head, his vision clearing. The mage was beside him, staff at the ready. His white surcoat was spattered with gore. “Yeah,” Thom said. He got to both feet. “Got any more of that lightning?”

“We’re in too close,” the mage said. “I can’t control where it jumps. I might hit our soldiers.” He switched the staff around in his hands. “Fire is easier to control.”

“Good,” Thom said. His head was clearing. “Let’s see some.”

The mage smiled, and the fire exploded outward, opening a path for Thom into the carnage.

Hours later, the company made camp in the deserted cattle byre. They’d retaken this side of the Chevin and another company had come up to pass through them and hold along the field beyond. His soldiers stood down. They sat by campfires, lay exhausted in the hay, or paced the perimeter too wired to rest. Thom was one of the latter. There were thirteen wounded and five dead, the wounded taken back across the Chevin to infirmary tents, the five dead laid out in the remains of the farmhouse waiting for the pyre. Dead killed by Darkspawn had to be burned. One of them was the male Templar. Thom had never learned his name.

The fog was rising off the river with nightfall. Thom walked around the sentries, then out to the fence line and back. All was quiet. Two figures moved just outside the byre. Thom frowned. There was something stealthy in their movements. Then they merged as though talking closely. Thom moved closer quietly. If somebody was up to no good….

It was the female Templar and the mage. They stood close together talking, quietly, not like prisoner and guard. Then he put his arms around her and she put hers around him, just standing leaning on one another as though they could hold each other up.

Well, Thom thought. Can’t fault that. A team of three and one gone. He left them to their grieving. He had his company to look after.

When Thom Rainier, aka Warden Blackwall, met Inquisitor Trevelyan in the backwoods of Ferelden, he thought the man looked vaguely familiar. But then he’d been a lot of places in his life and seen a lot of people. The Inquisitor was a good man with a good cause.

It wasn’t until they fought side by side in the Exalted Plains, the Orlesian civil war a waste of lives and ruin of land, when the Inquisitor put aside his plain leathers for the white of an Orlesian battlemage, that Thom knew him. Jauffre Trevelyan had stood on the line of the Chevin with him eleven years ago. Dark hair was silver now, his sharp face more lined, though he was no older than Thom. He had the same little smile as lightning flew from his fingers, as though magic were a sensual pleasure.

For a moment Thom froze. The common sense asserted itself. Jauffre Trevelyan had never seen Captain Rainier unmasked. It was the uniform. He’d never seen him without the full-face steel mask. He couldn’t possibly recognize him. This man who he was starting to think of as a friend as well as a commander would never put it together. 

They would stand back to back again against whatever came, and Warden Blackwall and the Inquisitor had nothing to do with Captain Rainier and the battlemage. Those men were long gone.

“For the Inquisition!” Thom shouted as he charged a group of undead. Lighting raced above him, cutting a path.


End file.
